Welcome to LEWTON BUS

Please take off your shoes and leave them by the door.

Seventy-four years ago, producer Val Lewton and director Jacques Tourneur scared the pants off of audiences with the sound of a bus pulling into frame. After the release of Cat People, the technique of dissipating tension with an innocuous jump scare came to be known as the “Lewton Bus.” If you’ve ever watched a slasher film and been startled by a cat jumping out of a cupboard, you’ve been a victim of it.

We don’t mean to scare you, but we don’t mean to be innocuous either. We’re just a bunch of people who are passionate about movies and have chosen that somewhat obscure bit of film lore as the name for a new film criticism site. We look forward to clogging up your RSS reader and Facebook feed.

To start out with we have two excellent article series. Allen Strickland has crawled through the trenches to deliver a catalogue of onscreen armed conflict: The Wars on Film. Meanwhile, Bee McGee has been making their way through the diverse filmography of divisive director Joel Schumacher in Beyond the Batnipples. This is just the beginning of these series so you have a lot more to look forward to. And there are more series in the works!

We’ve also posted several standalonereviews and essays and there’s more to come in that regard, including festival reviews and work from other authors! In fact, drop me a line if you’re interested in contributing!

In other words, keep coming back! We’re longtime film fans who love talking and writing about movies, and we’re excited to share that with other people. Be sure to comment (as long as you’re not mean), share our posts with your friends and enemies, eat plenty of fruits and vegetables and, most of all, keep watching movies! I mean that’s the whole point, right?